#95 Grant Hicks – Transcript

Louis van der Merwe
Welcome to another episode of Ensembl advice I’m really excited to have with me in the studio today, Grant Hicks grant book has been on my desk for many, many years guerilla marketing for financial advisors that he co wrote with Jay Levinson. It is one of those books that if you own a financial planning practice, or if you’re a financial planner, you you have to read this multiple times. Grant, thank you so much for being here and sharing some of your your pearls of wisdom that you’ve crafted over over many decades doing this.

Grant Hicks
Yeah, thanks for asking. Excited to be here.

Louis van der Merwe
I want to jump off with your your big, hairy, audacious goal you just mentioned to me helping 20,000 families get comprehensive planning advice. Now, when I hear that my mind doesn’t have anything else, then scaling advice, like, tell me how you got to how did you get to the 20,000 number? And I’m curious why 20,000?

Grant Hicks
Well, I was at a conference and one of the speakers challenged us to talk about our big, you know, big, hairy, audacious goal. And he says think bigger. And at the time, you know, as a financial adviser, I could help 100 to 200 families give comprehensive planning and advice. And when I went into consulting, I’m like, Okay, well, what’s my goal? Now? What am I trying to accomplish? Am I trying to make people better business owners, better advisors? What, what could be the impact here. And so I started to track the advisors that I was working with. And we were having this goal and this target, I’m helping, you know, you’ve got 100 to 200 ideal clients and families that you want to give comprehensive planning advice to. And I started to track the number and my original number was 10,000. And I hit that we’ve helped 10,000 People get comprehensive planning advice in all seven areas that are financial life, we’re talking tax estate, investment, risk, insurance, debt, and cashflow. We want to get their complete financial life organized. And we want to help them get comprehensive advice in all of those areas. And so we want to put together not only a plan, but the organization of all the information to help them get better planning and advice. So it starts with you organization. And it was along the way along the way. advisors would, you know, listen and embrace this and go, Yeah, I want to do that. That’s why they listen to these podcasts. That’s why they, they want to do more planning and advice. And so we started on the track of, let’s track this, how many ideal clients do you have, that are organized in all seven areas? And have comprehensive plans? Because not everybody wants comprehensive plans on every once all of that. But let’s track of how many you have now. Because, you know, Louis, that’s probably where you do your best work is with your best clients and comprehensive planning, isn’t it?

Louis van der Merwe
Absolutely. The more someone engages and the more someone interacts with our team, the happier they tend to be. And the happier I tend to be as financial planner,

Grant Hicks
right. And so that’s getting the best out of you, and that my job is to get the best out of you. And the client, it’s a win win. And so that’s where the that’s where the 20,000 mark goes. So we’re working on it.

Louis van der Merwe
What strikes me is that the fact that it’s comprehensive, and like you said, all the areas of their financial plan, this is not just someone that has bought a financial product or implemented an investment plan. This is someone’s life and their family’s lives that have been changed.

Grant Hicks
Yeah, absolutely. When I first started out, you know, 33 years ago, believe it or not, as in the financial business, I thought I need to know everything I gotta take every tax course I’m going to take every estate planning course are going to take all this stuff. And one of my mentors taught me that you’re the conductor of the orchestra, you don’t need to know how all the instruments play, but you coordinate everything. So becoming a really good coordinator. So you don’t need to understand or know every single intricate detail about taxes and tax planning. But, but, you know, Louis, what percentage of financial advisors get the copy of the tax return and the will from clients? What percent?

Louis van der Merwe
Actually don’t know from a percentage perspective, I guess it would be in the low to low teens.

Grant Hicks
It’s about 4% 4%. Okay, so that’s the starting point like like copies of the tax return to tell you about the quite a bit about the client, whether it be one to three years of tax returns, copies of the will tell us a heck of a lot about the relationships with people. Right. These are critical documents that we don’t need to do fact finding out One, because it’s a complete waste of time. Because when you get those documents, the questions come out of that, not only from you, but from the clients point of view. Right. And so that’s the starting point. We talked about tax and estate. I mean, you know, Lulea, question was last time you saw written estate plan.

Louis van der Merwe
I’m busy writing on for client now. So other than the ones that she reached out to and saying, I need to update my estate plan to ask, well, please send us a copy. And he received it.

Grant Hicks
Exactly these mythical creatures that people don’t write. So that’s what we want to, you know, help people have. I mean, some of the advisors that I work with, you know, on coaching, consulting, they love dealing with business owners, and they do Exit Planning for business owners, they don’t do succession because succession is a part transition is apart, but your exit plan, and they’re writing exit plans for business owners. Now that’s comprehensive, because once you have that exit plan, then you can plan the rest of your life and your business and everything else like that. You know, every business owner thinks that, you know, someone magically appears with a cheque, and they’re gonna buy this business and life is wonderful. We know that we read those stories all the time, but that’s not every small business. Right? So we need to help people with exit plans, right? These are some of the strategies that help people get comprehensive planning and advice. That’s where you do your best work, isn’t it?

Louis van der Merwe
Alright, salutely. And this sounds like basic things, but you’re helping someone to actually take action and say, Hey, have you implemented this in your client base? Is this they’re like, show me the numbers? Do we track it? And that’s something I want to talk a little bit about. But those numbers we track within our business, you know, like, you have this this 10,000 that you’ve already hit on your way to 20,000? What are the important numbers other than the vanity metrics that we like tracking, right? The numbers of AUM that we look after? What are those numbers that you see people actually neglect and never think of in their business? Yeah.

Grant Hicks
It’s it’s actually ironic that you asked that question, because the advisor that I was working with this morning, I said, Give me an update from a numbers perspective. And from, I’ll use your term of vanity perspective of your success year to date. And he goes, I haven’t hit the numbers, we’re okay, we’re doing great. I’m not too worried about that. But what we’ve accomplished the last six months, we have a great flow of come communication with our clients, we have a great amount of consistency with our clients and our team. We’re we’ve implemented more processes than we ever have in our practice. And we have a sense of calmness in our practice that we’ve never had before. And I wrote that down. That’s exactly what we’re trying to build is an ideal practice. Because the practice of the year isn’t the one with the biggest numbers ever, is it? And that’s why we call it an ideal practice. Because you get to build your own business, Louis, that’s the cool part of this industry. You get to build your ideal practice your ideal business, and what that means to you, and how are you going to measure the success and the results that you get out of it. He’s got a sense of calmness, that that he hasn’t had for two years in his practice, because he had, you know, some other issues and chaos and partners and things that he was trying to manage and eliminate in his life. And he’s like, he was very, very relaxed. It was it was it was a fantastic meeting. Because that’s what that’s the end result that we’re trying to get to. And guess what, that’s an emotional word. So measure your logical numbers, your AUM or revenue or how you measure it, I got millions of metrics on a practice management point of view. And we could spend three hours on those metrics. KPIs are very important. But it’s also the emotional peace, peace of mind, not only for your clients, but but for yourself. So that makes sense.

Louis van der Merwe
Absolutely. And just hearing that sense of calm, thinking that this would have been a journey for him, you know, probably from running around like headless chicken, constantly being busy during the busy work. And someone said the other day, playing business playing practice, instead of actually tying this into a life that you enjoy and your family can enjoy it and having a sense of calm. Before we started this conversation. You mentioned a number around how many people rely more On the emotions to make decisions, and now you mentioned it again, right? We need to be in touch with our emotional state as business owners, there’s been a bit of a shift within the profession around the psychology of money, are you seeing people embracing that and is that making a change to their practices

Grant Hicks
in the United States, they’re probably I would assume that they’re more advanced, a little more than than Australia. But behavior finance firms are hiring behavior finance experts and behavioral finance people more than ever before. And I think they’re a few years ahead of, of Canada, I’m not sure about South Africa. But that behavior finance piece is becoming critical to the success of the practice, not only we’ve had so many struggles, in the past two years of hiring people, I was on the phone with another top firm in Canada today and chest have so much struggles hiring people that, that, that that piece. But But putting together you know, what we’re looking at from a, from a practice management point of view. We look at, you know, basically five components, we look at the business plan, we look at the marketing plan, we look at the process plan, we look at the team plan, and then we look at all the KPIs, and we we build the metrics from there. So those those five key pieces all feed into. Exactly what I said, is that calmness of what are you trying what’s the, what’s the actual emotional goals that you’re trying to get at, to accomplish in your in your practice, because at the end of the day, I know I did it three times three, I worked past capacity, I was at 125 250%. And just just just going, right? You know, you can’t keep speeding down the freeway with, right forever, you’re either gonna run out of gas or get a speeding ticket, but you can’t keep going past capacity. And we, we keep doing this in the financial business all the time. And that behavior finance swings back and saying look at, we have to, you know, manage arm, our emotions. And we also have to help clients to manage our emotions, we can’t manage other people’s emotions, if we’re not there. You know what I mean. And if we’re working past capacity, there’s so many advisors that are running past capacity and are winging it and are running around like crazy. And they, they need to take that step back. listen to a podcast of yours that focuses on that behavior, finance, I mean, I would encourage everyone listening, the one thing to do today or get out of this is followed some behavioral finance experts, like there’s Daniel Crosby, in the United States, there’s a whole bunch of names, there’s people to follow, that will really help you. I mean, at the very least, my favorite is Nick Murray, and his latest book on scripts, like it’s phenomenal stuff, it’s heavily in our art, it’s a lot of behavior, finance number, you know, the line in this book, and I know it so well, as you know, the successful the advisor is about, you know, planning and advice, not portfolio and performance, and all the behavioral finance pieces that we just, that’s what we call, going back to the basics. And I think that’s what we, you know, we tend to do when we were on that treadmill, we get things a little too complicated. We go back on holidays, we relax, and we go back to basics. Does that make sense? Taking

Louis van der Merwe
that break and kind of unplugging it for someone that’s been in the industry, maybe 1520 years, I think you get to a point where you’re like, Okay, now I can breathe a little bit. But in those beginning first years, some days, it’s expected that you are just, you know, running at 120%. Like I’m talking about, maybe the first three, four years. What would your advice be to young advisors starting out? Like, is they are we trying to do too much in those early years? Because this is something that just takes more time? Or do you think they tend to focus on the wrong things?

Grant Hicks
Well, when you’re starting out, you go from, I don’t know what I don’t know. to Now I know what I don’t know. And it would win yet. And when you hit that point, you’re like, Okay, now I gotta have I gotta tackle this. Now. I got to, you know, find out. You know, what, I don’t know and what am I going to do about it? And the best thing that I had Louis, he was my mentor. And I put it on a sticky note front of me right now. It says There’s nothing urgent in financial services. There’s nothing urgent and financial services that I would encourage you to write that down part, my sticky note and put it in front of you. There is nothing urgent financial services. And so that’s where the sense of calmness comes back to, we don’t need to be responding and be on top of everything and, you know, social media and technology and like the software and the systems that we’re talking about shortly. It’s just it’s coming at us at such a rate. Whereas just nothing urgent here. There’s nothing urgent here. And so we need to design an ideal week, an ideal month, an ideal quarter, maybe two quarters, and that bridges into doing that as a habit. And then that works into an ideal year. And so just start with your ideal week, what’s ideal week look like how many clients you want to see how many prospects we’d like to see how many centers of influence you’d like to see. And I always do this exercise. For you, Louis, it might be six to one, six clients to prospects, one COI, other advisors, it’s like 931, let’s find the formula that’s going to work for you that you can do on a consistent basis. And then let’s build that formula. And then take that, put the numbers out and work backwards, is that going to help me build the business that I want to do? The cool part about this is you get to build a business, you get to design it and build it and figure out what that looks like for you. Not many people can do that. Not many businesses can do that we can at this industry. That’s why it’s a fantastic industry. So there you go. Does that make sense?

Louis van der Merwe
Absolutely. I love that, how you start with that conscious incompetence, saying Oh, no, I know what I know. And we want to fix it all at once, instead of slowing down saying, hey, there’s nothing urgent, you know, I always say, Well, you know, someone’s gonna phone us if someone’s passed away. But even at that point, we can’t do much, and we can support them. But it is the house is never on fire, there is not something we need to put out. Yet sometimes it feels like clients have an expectation that their problem is urgent. How would you position that then, when a client feels as if you know, this thing is really important and really urgent for me? Yet, we’re saying there’s nothing urgent in financial services feels like a little bit of a disconnect. Is there something that you know, how would you tackle that?

Grant Hicks
It’s the triangle of expectations, the triangle of expectations, the client has their expectations. And then you take that problem, and you do some administration on that expectation, and then you give it to your team to actually implement to deliver. The client thinks it’s going to take X amount of time, you think it’s going to take X amount of time? And the staff go, Louie, are you crazy, it’s gonna take a whole pile of time. So it’s, it’s managing that trial, the triangle of expectations, because what happens is a client comes in, they’re very urgent, and then they you respond to them. And then you go back to the staff, and the staff gets very frustrated with you. And the circle keeps going. So I’m familiar to people out there listening, right? And I’m not

Louis van der Merwe
saying you can’t see now, but this happens on a daily basis. File,

Grant Hicks
right. So we have two sets of service expectations, we have our ideal clients. So we need to know who our ideal clients are, right? Your top 50 or less, your top 50 or less, these are your ideal clients, and they get the best service expectations. And then everybody else swing you fly on a plane. Most advisors run a first class and a coach play. Okay, try not to do an ABCD segmentation, it’s a make work project, you have to go first class and your coach. Okay. And you build expectations for your first class clients, with your team. And then you build your service expectations for everybody else in coach. And a simple way to do it is first class is, you know, we always want to acknowledge everybody’s got, you know, some urgency or an issue. Acknowledgement is the key. So we acknowledge yet we’ll get back to you in this period of time. We will acknowledge and and make sure we take care of it. But what I would do is we get emails, messages, calls from clients, your best clients, you only respond to your ideal clients in the morning. If it’s in that morning, everybody else service issues, put it to the afternoon. So your your perfect week is your We’re always working with your best clients in the morning, and you’re servicing everybody else in the afternoon. It’s just a mindset to have. But it’ll really help you go from react to everybody to react to your best clients, because that’s who is paying you the most. And you want to make sure that you do exceptional service, and then everybody else. So you need to build to service standards with your staff and your team. And everybody’s on the same page. Here’s our ideal clients, and here’s what we’re going to deliver to them. And here’s what they expect. And here’s what everybody else gets. And here’s what we’re going to do and deliver to them. Thoughts are about at least

Louis van der Merwe
50 in the in the top, would you segment them ideal clients by revenue? Or do financial planners typically have a different definition of an ideal client?

Grant Hicks
So most advisors I work with, I try to make sure that on their desk, they have a clear definition of who their ideal clients are. And there’s both four or five criteria. The first one is financial delegators. They have to be a financial delegator. A financial delegator. Louis is someone who gives you all the business or a majority of the business gives you all the information. Likes, your planning and advice wants to work with you. And they delegate everything to you to take care of, because they value time more than money. And it always shocks me that someone with $50 million can delegate to one person, and so on. $500,000 has four or five advisors. Okay, so we’re trying to find financial delegators. Unfortunately, in North America, I’m not sure what other countries, but I was, I’m sure it’s similar, but only half wealthy people are financial delegators. Okay. And so that’s the first criteria is we’re trying to find financial delegators. Right. If you’re chasing for information, or documents, or I’ll give you some money, you’re part of the information. I mean, they don’t have to give you all the money right away. But over time, like, the, the intention is they’re going to have one person they delegate to trust, to take care of all this. And so the first criteria is obviously financial delegators. And then from there, you build your ideal client profile. If you’re the wealth business, it’s 55. Plus, because that’s where the majority of the money is, if you’re in the insurance business, it might be a younger age. And then you have you worry, niche or demographic hit might be a successful entrepreneur, I don’t call the business owners because I know a lot business owners that are not successful entrepreneurs, but I call them successful entrepreneurs, wealthy retirees, your corner office executives, or professionals or your other, whatever the categories are. So having a very clear definition of who your ideal clients are. And then the final criteria from the planning side of things, Louis is we do our best work with clients with a net worth of whatever your number is, we do our best work with clients with a net worth of two to $10 million. Louis, you probably get asked all the time, oh, what type of clients you work with? What’s the size? What’s the minimum? What do you take care of? Would you take on a client with $50,000, and very little investments for insurance if they had a $10 million net worth in a real estate portfolio, and they needed help? Right. So it’s about the net worth, the net worth is about helping people the planning side of things. So we focus on net worth, not assets, Aum revenue, etc. And then the final thing to think about, this is not how you get paid, because every country and every advisor is different. But you just want to have a minimum, at the very least a revenue that this is the revenue that you generate for all the planning and advice that you deliver. Okay, you might not get paid that way. Yeah, but are you? Are you working with $10,000? Client 20,000? Or what’s the revenue target want to work with? And I’ll teach you a little kind of trick or strategy here. So what would be a revenue target that you might want to have for an ideal client? Really? Give me a skimming number.

Louis van der Merwe
So within our business, we targeted at 25,000 Rent rents in the first year from a planning perspective, then we’d kind of cover our costs for for planning. X wouldn’t necessarily say ideal, but that gives us a starting point. Sure.

Grant Hicks
Okay. So how do you go from 25,000 ran to 50,000 Grant, what do you need to do?

Louis van der Merwe
So it would just be the size of the assets and more complexity. And typically, if someone’s going through a life transition, we would spend more time with them, and hence charge a larger fee.

Grant Hicks
Okay, and what else would you need to do to move up mark?

Louis van der Merwe
typically have more assets that are linked to the business. Yeah, larger investment portfolios or increasing the fee that we charge for that investment portfolio.

Grant Hicks
Yeah. And to get into that market, what do you need to do?

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, have referrals from centers of influences or? Yeah, so access those, those clients,

Grant Hicks
we need to market to them, right. But we also need to deliver more value? Absolutely. How do we deliver more value and how to become more valuable? Comprehensive Planning and advice more value? And so that’s the first component. And the second component is the trick question. I said, How do you go from an ideal client? To another ideal client? Change the context? I want to take your ideal clients, Louis, and turn them into ideal families? Do you have any siblings, brothers and sisters? Okay. And so if you had brothers and sisters, and if your parents were still around, I want to get your siblings and your parents, I turned an ideal client into an ideal family, we’ll go from 25 grand to 50 to 75, rad. Well, won’t we. And so think about the family planning dynamic. And that expands it. We’re not necessarily dealing with kids or younger people, because everyone thinks family, they think the kids, I’m thinking siblings, and parents, I’m thinking out and up. So now you expand, if we have 50 ideal clients, and we turn those 50 into ideal families, Lily, I think we just doubled your revenue, didn’t we?

Louis van der Merwe
You’re going to be busy for a long time your business is going to be growing, there you go. And once there’s a family connected, you know, they feel they feel special, they feel like oh, wow, you’re looking after the whole family. And you can, you know, the values of that family continues.

Grant Hicks
Correct. And that’s where you now have a lot of moving parts. And that’s where you can do your best work for your best families. Because there’s the dynamics there isn’t there. There’s the emotional, there’s the behavior finance piece in there, along with planning and advice. That’s why the behavioral finance piece is starting to grow more, as well as the conference planning enterprise. So those two are the big catalyst, as we see in the industry that are pushing the industry forward report, they’re forcing us to go back to taking psychology in university like I did, and learn about behavioral finance piece, along with the comprehensive planning and advice. The cool thing about the comprehensive planning and advice is, you don’t need to learn it all. You’re the coordinator. Bring in the experts bring in other people to help you put that together. Everyone’s got that support network. So there you go.

Louis van der Merwe
Guys, Grant, I don’t know if you’ve come across the work of Rick Kaler. But he talks often about integrated family systems, which the idea is that if something changes in one of the family members lives, it impacts the rest of the family as well. And so now I really liked this concept of kind of an ideal family. But my question is, how do you attract these families? How do you market to them? How do they come to you? I know you have some interesting thoughts around that. Yeah. So

Grant Hicks
what happens with advisors? You and I? Well, I was taught years ago, at the end of the meeting, when everyone’s happy talk about referrals. And that’s what we were taught from day one. And of course, you know, compliance now has more forms and more paperwork and worse administration more. There’s so much to do in a meeting, I had an aha moment. A while back, I was doing my technology checklist. And I realized just to do a meeting, you need five pieces of technology to prep for meeting five pieces of technology to actually have a meeting and five pieces to do the follow up. Holy smokes. There’s 15 pieces of technology to do one meeting, the wonder advisors are burned up, right. So what I discovered through this is, you don’t have time to have these family connections as family meetings, these family conversations, you need to have what I call a secondary meeting. In other words, I’m meeting after the meeting. So what I highly encourage advisors to think about is you have a meeting with a client, you do all the planning advice, and that might take anywhere between an hour hour and a half, whatever that whatever that process is, and then plan a secondary meeting where we could actually Have some of these conversations. And so I have a meeting with you between 11 till noon, and then we’ll go out for lunch. And at that lunch, when we’re done the meeting, we’re done the business, we parked it now we can ask you some questions. And I would ask you some questions such as, you know, really was money like growing up in your household? And you tell me a bit about that. And, you know, most people had a struggle, and it was tough, and so forth. And so interesting, where did you get your money values from? Who do you who you get your money from? You talk about your mom, your dad, you know, different things that happen your family? Oh, you know, that’s very interesting. And, you know, so who do you talk to about money? Well, I talked to my parents, and this and that, so forth. And the obvious comes up is saying, Yeah, you know, you should be talking to my mom or dad about, you know, what they’re doing with their finances. And And all we’re doing is we’re having a conversation about where you got your money values from, that leads into? Well, that’s interesting. You say that, really, because we have a family plan? Did you know about our family plan. Now the family plan is a notional plat. So I’ll always check things with your compliance branch manager, but the family plan has a notional plan, where we’re going to give more planning and advice to families. So it’s just a notional plan, per se. And you know, what our family plan now what’s that? Well, when you introduce us to family members, we have a process that we walk them through. And if they become clients as well, you know, then there’s some added value for family play. And that’s where we’re going to take clients, to families. So we need the time to have that conversation. And we need to have some questions to ask them to build and bridge to that conversation. So there’s three questions you could ask people for lunch. Now by take up to an hour. Question number one, tell me what was money like growing up in your household? Question number two, that’s interesting. Who do you get your money values from and, and why? And number three is, who do you talk to, but money in your family? And that opens up that Ooh, yeah, you know, what, you should talk to my brother or my sister or my relatives, my rich uncle, etcetera, etcetera. And that’s where these conversations spur into So, so the secondary meetings, I always encourage kind of four things, you have a great meeting with the client, they got massive value. Now it’s your turn to get a little bit of value back. And you ask four questions. Number one is the family meeting, or the family questions? You know, what our family plan? Number two? Is? The network professionals, and so are you happiest? Your current advisor, accountant, lawyer, realtor, mortgage broker, General Insurance Agency, et cetera. And you’re giving and getting names. It’s a process that I that had built for, you could you could give and get three to six names in three minutes or less. Number three, question is, you know, I really like dealing in and I’ll tell you a quick little story. I, I went to one of my clients, and I said, and I said, I really liked dealing with retired pilots like you back. Where would I find more retire pilots?

That question alone? You’ll either get crickets, I don’t know. Or you’ll get

the answers shocked me. Every time I got the answers. He says, Oh, that’s a that’s a great, great question. Why don’t you come out to the hangar, there’s a whole bunch of retired pilots that work on their planes will go for a flight and my plane, and I’ll introduce you to some retired pilots. Now what I have ever thought of that in 10 million years on a marketing plan to go to the hangar and meet people like maybe you want to find your best clients. I wrote a book on this, Louis, I, the best thing I could do is have you ask your clients the question. Okay, I always get my best ideas from my clients. So I asked my client, where can I find them? And it was like, go there. We go on his plane, we go for a flight, landed the plane walk in the hangar. Hey, I’d like you to meet my financial advisor. Hey, I’d like you to meet my financial advisor. What just happened, Louis and that sentence? I got bet it

Louis van der Merwe
that trust just transferred. Yes.

Grant Hicks
To you. That’s the hardest part of this business. Who are you? What do you do? Are you any good?

Louis van der Merwe
I just you’re in the industry just accomplish

Grant Hicks
that. With him saying that get introduced. So I loved introductions. Referrals are fantastic. But I loved introductions. And so you get introduced as well if your next adviser you gotta be pretty good. Right? And

Louis van der Merwe
especially if he’s hanging out with you, just, this is not even a business. Exactly,

Grant Hicks
exactly. So you want to Ask people that, you know, if I were to find more people like you were when I go well what I do, I mean, I’ve had clients advisors that I work with, and they asked, you know, a couple quick little stories they asked their surgeon, you know, you’re busy people, how can I find more surgeons like you guy says, Oh, I got a study group once you come to the house and all introduced a whole bunch of surgeons really know.

Louis van der Merwe
And the quick grant, the question wasn’t even Can you introduce me to these Purell? People just want that one.

Grant Hicks
So write that down, like, just learn to find more people? Well, the last story, he says, You know, I would love

Louis van der Merwe
to know who you want to find. I would, I would add that, you know, you started with, hey, identified that this is the type of person that I need more

Grant Hicks
exact. You did the work, but it’s the last one was the supervisor, he was dealing with farmers and I’ve never dealt with farmers. I don’t know how to find farmers. So how do I market to the farmers? I said, here’s what you do. You’re just gonna go ask your top 10 Farm clients, this question. So he says, hey, if I were to find more farmers, like you were gonna go, okay, so Oh, come to the coffee shop next Friday. He goes there. And he just meets bunch of people dressed up as a bunch of bombs and hobos worth about three $400 million. And off he goes, right? I can’t make this stuff up, Louis. Okay. So

Louis van der Merwe
marketing plan disordered for

Grant Hicks
Eric, you go. So, so have what I call secondary meetings, which is a chance to engage in these questions, to find out more about their family, to find out how you would market to more people like that to find out the network professionals they’re working with. And the final piece on that is find out what events or activities they’re involved in. And advisors always try to plan their own events, why you go to your clients events, and meet people that they already know, and that they get introduced to, it’s a heck of a lot easier to do than planning your own doggone event and trying to fill the seats. Right. If you went to 10 clients events this year, Louis, I think you’d meet a few people and get introduced. Right? So that’s the context. We just need time. And, and having if you had 10 secondary meetings with your top 10 clients and just take them out for lunch? I think it’d be a pretty good investment, Would you not agree?

Louis van der Merwe
Is it important that it’s in a different location that it feels as if, hey, the business meeting has now ended? And now this is more of a social meeting? It’s

Grant Hicks
a good point. It doesn’t have to be, but it usually is more in a relaxed atmosphere, not a business environment. Right. And so it’s very hard to do these conversations, you know, sitting in your office, or maybe in a in a Zoom meeting, you know, with a client, you can still do it. But it’s probably not as effective as it’s just a casual conversation. Right? It’s very casual approach.

Louis van der Merwe
Because granted, when we talk about the kind of more behavioral finance conversations, a lot of advisors often say, How do I start introducing this to my clients, and this might be a perfect time to say, hey, this, there’s the secondary meeting, the meeting, the after party, the meeting, after the meeting, where we can have these conversations, you can just weave it in naturally in the conversation, so it doesn’t feel as foreign and like you said, you are delivering even at

Grant Hicks
three o’clock, let’s have a meeting from three to four, four o’clock. Let’s go have a nice cold drink on a patio somewhere. And, and just have a conversation. I just got a couple more questions for you. So I’m fair. Clients, like Yeah, sure. Let’s spend a bit more time together and, and off you go, right. And, and or if they don’t have time, that day, saying, hey, I want to circle back next week and just buy a coffee, breakfast, lunch, whatever, and just have a chat. Where’s your favorite coffee shop, we’ll just meet there for for 20 minutes. And that 20 minutes of time that you invested? You’re going to clone your best client. Let me think about this. If I should do this, do I have time for that? Hey, secondary meetings will really help you grow your business.

Louis van der Merwe
Feels like often we’re looking for shortcuts instead of just doing the things that really work like this. You have the recipe now go do the work. But Why do so few people then actually go and implement this? You know, I’m thinking about people listening to the podcast. Why is it that we struggle with that implementation piece and then maybe that accountability piece of taking what grant has just said and actually going to do it?

Grant Hicks
Human nature kicks in? You know, we have a we have a coach on a bench. I’m a hockey player. always played hockey and and I know I gotta be be in this position at this time and do this and do that and execute, and so forth. I don’t know, but I get kind of smart or lazy or whatever, and I don’t do it. Go back to the bench, the coach tells me, right. But if you don’t have that accountability person there, we just get kind of off track. So I always encourage advisors, you know, have, have someone that helps you with the accountability piece that you just kind of report into. We don’t want to be, you know, countable all the time for someone and you got to hit your targets and goals and numbers. We’re just talking about when you get off track, which we all do. You just need that nudge to get back on track. And don’t ask Thank you, right. And so it’s the human nature in us that, you know, find someone that can help you on a regular basis. Help you hold hold you accountable, whether it be an associate, or a partner, or other financial advisor, that you connect with, saying, Hey, I just want to report what I’m doing, and what I want to do to you. They don’t really have to do it. They just have to kind of listen to that to you. And and now you’ve got that accountability piece without that accountability. Yeah, human nature kicks in. And I just see that over and over and over, including myself. I’m sitting there one day with y coach, and he asked me the question that I asked everybody else and I’m like, yes. Oh, my goodness. I’m doing it myself. It’s human nature kicks in naturally. And I’m like, Okay, I just needed that. Oh, yes. Okay. Quick, little back to basics. This is what we need to do. Right. And we do that by when we listen to podcasts, those reminders keep coming back to us, you need to do this. That’s why we do these podcasts for people, right.

Louis van der Merwe
So you’re sitting, you’re still working with the coach, even though you’re training other advisors to do this. The coach needs good. Yeah,

Grant Hicks
I got my coach and mentor and work with Elon on a regular basis. And it’s the cost for reminders. And I’m like, every year I go spend three or four days and like why am I doing this? I know this stuff, and then the first 20 minutes? Yeah, that’s all the reminders that I forgot. That’s why backed up things. Right? I don’t know how to answer it, but by human nature, right.

Louis van der Merwe
I must tell you before we started this conversation, we use a coach his name is Johan with tears. And you and if you’re listening to this, I sent him a message saying, Hey, I’m so excited. I’ve got a podcast with a client. And he sent me all these, like thumbs up emojis, because he keeps on forwarding me a lot of your emails. And it’s, it’s that accountability, someone would say that can get excited for you. But that you also don’t want to disappoint even more so than your than yourself, like, oh, I don’t want to disappoint that person. So we can do that. So it’s setting yourself up for success.

Grant Hicks
Yes, the five part is, is what I sometimes I do some role playing with advisors. They know the stuff inside now they struggle when they roleplay with me because they don’t want to let me down. It’s a game, it’s the same thing what you just said. That’s funny.

Louis van der Merwe
Grant, if people are listening to this, and they might want to engage you for your, your services, what would be the best way to reach out to you and kind of learn more about what you do? Yeah, so when

Grant Hicks
I’ve got a website called advisor, practice management, advisor, practice management.com. And there’s a place where you can just sign up for a blog, and I write a weekly blog in. And I encourage you to sign up for the blog, not because I’m promoting myself, but these are working with advisors like yourself, Louis, and different issues and cases come up on a weekly basis. And as I’m writing notes, and talking to top advisors, I write down blog content. And so all of the blogs that I produce on a weekly basis are, you know, some live Curt things or issues that I’m dealing with, with advisors just like you, and sometimes you’ll go Oh, yeah, that’s the problem I’ve been trying to solve. And that’s very similar to what I’m trying to do or, or, or an issue in my business. And so I’ve heard you just kind of sign up for the blog and, you know, just follow along. There’s some tools or resources that you can also sign up for put together a I know it’s a little lengthy, but it’s, you know, it’s a 11 page corporate practice management checklist. It’s going to ask you a whole list of questions of things to think about in your business, just to think to make you a better business person. And there’s a couple other tools there that you can kind of sign up for. So just go to advisor practice management.com You And, you know, just sign up for it, or at the very least, take a look at the blog section and see if there’s anything that applies to you, there’s a whole list of different blogs that you’ll, you don’t have to worry about looking at all that. But you know, sign up, because on a weekly basis, you’ll just kind of get the message. And so weeks are like, now, I’m good with that. But some other weeks are like, yeah, that’s, that’s my business, because I’m dealing with the problems that you’re talking about on a daily, weekly. And, you know, 3540 hours a week with, you know, five zoom calls a day, five times a week, 25 Zoom calls week, that’s where I’m getting the content from. It’s from advisors, just like you, Lily. So there you go.

Louis van der Merwe
I want to echo The value of those checklists, I have not met someone that have are able to take off everything in those checklists. Every time I read them, it prompts something amusing, and really need to make time to work on this part of my business. Thank you, thank you for putting out such valuable content, giving it away for free, giving your time today away for free. I truly appreciate it. It’s been a wonderful conversation. Is there anything you want to leave the listeners with? As a pot?

Grant Hicks
Yeah, you said giving it away for free. That’s what you want to do with some of your best clients and prospects as you want to become valuable. Give them something of value. And, you know, here’s a couple things, you might want to give away a sample plan for someone similar in their situation? What is the sample comprehensive plan look like? We get a push back all the time, Lily, I don’t need or want a sample plan? Or why do I need a plan? They’ve never seen a comprehensive plan? How do they know they don’t want one? Right? Do you have it away, show the value of your work to some of your best clients and prospects and they’re gonna go wow, this is phenomenal. And it might be a sample plan. It might be a sample case study, it might be a sample checklist of some ideas and things. So your whole goal is to take people from I don’t know what I don’t know, to now what I don’t know. And that’s why you, you get to become altruistic, you give it away for free. And regardless if they work with you or not, you’ve given value to them in their life. So the whole goal here is become a very altruistic advisor, and that’s going to people is going to lead a path to you because they see that you’re providing tremendous value, you’re gonna provide a following. And I know that I’m not going to coach and work with every single advisor that listens to every single podcast, but I want to provide value. And so just become a little bit more altruistic. So the last parting question I’m going to ask everyone is, what can you offer a value to the people that you run across every single day. And if you just give them that, then they’re going to, you know, you’re gonna find a really good following. I’ll leave it with that, Lily, I really appreciate your time today. And thanks for chatting with everyone.

Louis van der Merwe
Thank you, Grant. That was wonderful that top advisors and the bass advisors that I’ve met, are all people that want to help someone else. And I think you’ve just positioned it and the conversation over the last 50 minutes has helped them become better advisors and hopefully move on towards, you know, that goal of the 20,000 families to get comprehensive planning and advice. Thank you, Grant.